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MONTREAL - If you follow hockey – and in this city, who doesn’t? – you know the Canadiens will have a few holes to fill when the new season begins.

The team needs a Top Six forward, a Top Four defenceman and a No. 1 éminence grise.

Or maybe that should be éminence rouge.

When the puck drops for the first time in October, Red Fisher won’t be in his usual Bell Centre seat. It’s a primo press box location, overlooking centre ice, and the chair will be occupied by someone banging out a game story.

Fingers will fly over the keyboard of a laptop. But the name above the story will not be “Red Fisher,” which means what is described and dissected will not be weighed – and, too often lately, found wanting – against the best hockey Montreal has ever seen.

Red covered teams that won 17 Stanley Cups. He chronicled the heroics of 15 members of the Hockey Hall of Fame.

Along the way, Red racked up three National Newspaper Awards – and more than a few scoops.

The late Ted Blackman used to tell a story about how the Canadiens would make important announcements. Journalists, including Blackman, who was writing for The Gazette, would be summoned to the team’s executive offices at the Forum.

“We’d be standing out on Lambert Closse St. having a smoke before the press conference started,” Blackman would recall. “And then a truck would pull up the curb and drop a stack of the early editions of the Montreal Star.

“On the front page was the news you were waiting to hear about. With Red Fisher’s byline.”

Red got the stories first because he knew everyone in hockey. And hockey people trusted him to be unfailingly honest and scrupulously fair.

Red expected the same in return. Red’s far-flung network of contacts was built on trust and mutual respect.

“Gentleman” is a tad grandiose for a Plateau kid who grew up in a flat above his father’s shoe shop. Red is what our people call a mensch.

By the early 1970s, when he was beating Blackman on stories, Red had been covering the Canadiens for almost 20 years. And he hadn’t reached mid-career.

I grew up reading Red in the Star, and he was my boss, sports editor of the paper when it folded in September 1979. We started at The Gazette a month later, me as an inept and unhappy rock critic, he as the eternal Red Fisher.

We worked in separate departments for 20 years. Then on a whim, I emailed Red some flip comments about my beloved Canadiens. He included my scribbling in his Saturday Red Line, and a regular feature was born.

I used Eeeee-mail mostly to riff on Red: about 200 words every week on the entirely fictitious life of the “Living Legend of Sports Journalism,” chronicling wild parties at his sprawling Côte St. Luc estate – notably the memorable Halloween costume bash at which Pat Hickey showed up as Stephanie Myles and Stephanie Myles came as Pat Hickey.

To his credit, Red laughed at all the gentle fun I was poking at him. And why wouldn’t he? I’m a pisher, and he’s Red Fisher.

The only verifiable facts in Eeeee-mail were allusions to Red’s favourite drink: Chivas Regal. As a pregame ritual, a generous tumbler of Scotland’s finest would be delivered discreetly to his place at the Red Fisher Table in the Bell Centre’s media lounge.

Thus fortified – and after exchanging pleasantries with hockey executives and out-of-town writers – Red would ascend to his press box aerie, from which he’d train those trademark black horn-rims on a game he understood better than anyone else in the building.

A hockey writing career that began the night of the Richard Riot – March 17, 1955 – ended in the dying 2012 days of a miserable Canadiens’ season. Describing the travails of a last-place team wasn’t much fun for a guy who had seen better. There were nights when Red looked like he’d rather be somewhere else.

And now, in the parlance of those young millionaires skating around at ice level, he’s hung ’em up.

To my surprise.

I thought Red would write at least until he was 90, matching the longevity of the great Milt Dunnell.

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